By Dan Ambrose: In the third and possibly the final fight between these two sluggers, #10 WBO welterweight contender Mike Alvarado (34-3, 23 KOs) vows to give an exciting fight in his trilogy match against #4 WBO Brandon Rios (32-2-1, 23 KOs) on January 24th at the 1stBank Center, in Bloomfield, Colorado, USA.
Alvarado was arrested this week for possession of a firearm in Denver. That issue is reportedly taken care of and it won’t impact the fight.
It’s unclear what’s going to happen in the future once Alvarado goes to court for the problem. But with him not being a world champion, it won’t impact any championship level fights other than keeping Alvarado out of one if he winds up doing jail time.
The fight will be aired by HBO. For the loser of the Alvarado-Rios fight, it could be a situation where they see their career going downhill from here unless their promoter Bob Arum wants to keep putting them together beyond three times.
That’s you can’t rule out entirely because Arum has already shown a history of putting on a lot of rematches due to him making a lot of in house fights with his Top Rank promotional company rather than matching his guys against fighters from different promotional companies.
“I’ll be ready Jan24th & give the best Trilogy #RADO 👊👊,” Alvarado said on his twitter.
This fight could be an interesting one if Alvarado fights the way he did in their first clash in 2012. That was the fight where Alvarado stood his ground and went toe-to-toe with Rios for 6 rounds until getting stopped in the 7th.
In their rematch in 2013, it was much less interesting fight to watch because Alvarado used movement for much of the fight, and Rios looked totally clueless in how to cut off the ring on Alvarado. Rios is really horrible at cutting off the ring, and Alvarado kind of exposed him in this fight as being incapable of even the basics in cutting off the ring.
Right now, Rios looks to be the better fighter slightly. He was awful in his last fight against Diego Chaves, but that’s because he was facing a good fighter with better power than himself. Rios was beaten badly by Manny Pacquiao in his fight before that in November of 2013.
What we’re really looking at is Rios coming into this fight with three straight defeats and not just two. The fight against Chaves should have been a loss for Rios if not for the referee suddenly disqualifying Chaves out of the blue in the 9th when he was on his way to a victory.
Alvarado has lost his last two fights against Juan Manuel Marquez and Ruslan Provodnikov. There’s no shame in losing to those guys because they’re better fighters than Rios, but Alvarado looked really poor in both fights. He was beaten pretty badly in both fights and looked like a shot fighter.
If Alvarado fights like that against Rios on January 24th then the chances are high that Rios will be able to do enough to get the win.
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